Cronoboros | Museo Experimental El Eco Pavillion 2020 | TANAT STUDIO

El Eco Pavilion is a biannual commission of the Museo Experimental El Eco. It Works as a national contest that looks for emerging architecture firms focused on the art-architecture binomial.

In January 2020, a jury composed by the architect Javier Senosiain, the artist Damián Ortega, the architect and critic Miquel Adrià, the members of the Museo Experimental El Eco and the editorial team of Buró-Buró met to review the projects presented and give the final verdict, announcing CRONOBOROS, the proposal of the mexican art and architecture studio TANAT, as the winner.[1]

Some of the previous winners of the Eco Pavilion have been Estudio MMX, Frida Escobedo, Macías Peredo, and Luis Aldrete.

TANAT’S PROPOSAL

Through the “Emotional Architecture Manifesto” (published in 1953), the artist Mathias Goeritz expressed a new form of architecture that goes beyond a logical and rational understanding of spaces, allowing the possibility of creating buildings capable of articulating deep sensations. As an example of this architecture, Goeritz conceived the El Eco museum as an experiment that frees itself from classical standards such as symmetry, structural coherence, and even the way in which a specific and unique function of each is inhabited. By reincorporating emotion into architecture, the possibility of conceiving it as part of a complex system of arts were retaken: sculpture, painting, dance, music, poetry and architecture were now integrated in a unified experimental space.

In this sense, “Cronoboros” the proposal for the El Eco 2020 Pavilion designed by the mexican studio TANAT, aimed to create a space that celebrates transformation and temporality as inherent characteristics of nature and its link with human life through contemplation and artistic expression. By transforming the patio of the El Eco Experimental Museum into a water mirror, the elements that compose the museum (walls and tower), as well as the surrounding elements that sometimes go unnoticed, such as the jacaranda tree, and the sky, could be reflected in an image that echoes its shapes and colors. In a similar way, the presence of the wind is visualized in the movement of the water, creating the possibility of making the water itself visible. Because; what would be of water, if it didn’t reflect anything?

At the center of the mirror standed a two-meter-high mountain made up of hundreds of stones whose shape simulates the result of the simple act of hand-picking a pile of sand and slowly letting it fall. The mountain, despite looking like a stone and static element, is only part of a pavilion that comes to life with the movement of a body that transforms it when walking on it. A new action, as simple as the one that formed it, is capable of modifying its stony fragility.

Through a performative action, carried out by the artist Galia Eibenschutz (on December 2020), the pavilion lived and expressed its objective: to visualize the transformation and its relationship with the human inside a space conceived for emotion. Through repetitive spiral movements, the cyclical archetype of the serpent was marked with footprints on a canvas of water and earth; ephemeral features of a snake that leaved traces along its path. The pavilion as an emotional architectural work acquired its full meaning in the experimentation of a subject, therefore, people enter the water mirror, walk it and interact with the stone elements. As the audience appropriated the pavilion, it acquired a playful and communal character, where each body immersed in the water produced a new transformation either consciously, by moving and playing with the water, or, unconsciously by simply walking through the stone weave. A new topography was built by the repetition of everybody’s actions. With this, each visitor’s behavior became part of the work. The lake, the stones, the reflection, and each of the elements acquired a new shape, and a new meaning.

In the space of the pavilion, the impossibility of walking without a reaction or trace was made evident. It raised the fundamental question about the effects of our actions as a metaphor of the landscape’s transformation. There will always be something new that could be created or destroyed. Our walk acquires relevance and raises a reflection upon which kind of new lines we imagine to create with our next steps.

ABOUT TANAT

TANAT is a research, architecture and art practice, based in Mexico City, founded by Diego Rivero Borrell.